Hubris takes them all down: This is why every president makes the same dumb mistakes

[bemildred]

ISIS: Iraq War 3.0

The national security sector of the Deep State achieved a zenith of incoherence in June 2014, during the advance toward Baghdad of the insurgent group ISIS. Having already committed advisers and drones to shore up the corrupt and incompetent Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki, the Obama administration announced on June 26, 2014, that it was asking Congress to appropriate half a billion dollars to arm and train rebels fighting Syrian dictator Bashir al Assad.

The request meant that the United States government would be giving lethal support to Syrian rebels, the most effective military element of which was ISIS—a group we were bombing just across the border in Iraq. Put bluntly, the operatives of the Deep State committed the American people to supporting both sides of a transnational Sunni-Shi’a religious war. Accompanying the request were the predictable useless assurances that we would be able to distinguish between armed factions in a sectarian conflict whose origins most of the so-called national security experts in Washington patently do not understand.

Obama, like his predecessors, had fallen prey to the hubristic theory— disproven in venues as widely separated as the mountains of Afghanistan and the jungles of Central America—that he and his advisers possessed the intelligence and the moral sensitivity to select between “good” and “bad” terrorists. Thus, having already been burned by a near-intervention in Syria the year before, Obama was ready to place his hand on the red-hot stove once more. He hinted to the press that he was taking the step reluctantly, which raised the larger question of whether Obama was really in charge of the national security functions he nominally commanded, or whether he was a mere chairman of the board who ratified the prevailing consensus. To crown this masterpiece of confused thinking, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council released a statement full of Orwellian doublethink, which justified sending a huge quantity of arms into a war zone while insisting that “we continue to believe there is no military solution to this crisis. . . .”

In the following months Obama pulled back slightly from his position, emphasizing the difficulty of distinguishing nascent democrats from jihadists among the Syrian rebels—a fair point, because it happened to be true. Such is the Alice in Wonderland nature of Washington, though, that Obama was attacked by Republicans, op-ed columnists, and his own former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, for not being sufficiently hawkish either in Syria or Iraq. The mainstream media, as usual, failed to note that ISIS, however horrible its rampages, was an outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq—a group that itself had arisen as a direct consequence of the U.S. occupation of Iraq a decade earlier. The media, therefore, gave strategic cover to the whole crowd of American know-nothings, from John McCain and Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, to revive their habitual war advocacy as if the previous decade’s events had not discredited them. Sounding a shrill note of unmanly hysteria, Lindsey Graham even insisted we act militarily “before we all get killed here at home.”

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/10/hubris_takes_them_all_down_this_is_why_every_president_makes_the_same_dumb_mistakes/

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Reading The Operators now, highly recommended.

It's by Michael Hastings, the reporter who died in the now suspicious fiery car wreck, and shows how the generals in charge of the Afghanistan War operate.
He was the recipient of the 2010 George Polk Award for his Rolling Stone magazine story "The Runaway General."

[jakeXT]

2. More chaos. more money /nt

[KoKo]

3. Hubris! An Interesting Read. (Does Greed Follow Hubris or is Greed Fulfilled the Cause of Hubris?)

Last edited Tue Jan 19, 2016, 01:00 PM - Edit history (1)

hubris
[hyoo-bris, hoo-]
noun
1.
excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hubris
------------------

Possibly the most discouraging result of this syndrome, however, is in foreign policy, as the irrational panic over ISIS has made painfully clear. More than a decade of war in the Middle East had discredited the authors of the Iraq invasion, disillusioned the public, and made further foreign adventurism thoroughly unpopular. The American people and their representatives in Congress were growing increasingly suspicious of the post-9/11 surveillance regime. Yet all that was required was for a terrorist group to bait us deliberately, just as Osama bin Laden had baited us years before, into reacting militarily as a tactic to aid their own jihadist recruiting. It is probable that Iraq and Syria will consume the rest of Barack Obama’s presidency, consign his cherished domestic agenda to the back burner, and create a long-term burden that Obama will hand down to his successor.

The Deep State Has Unleashed Irrational Cultural Forces

Another problem the Deep State faces, although it is not yet an imminent threat, is the contradiction between the means of its survival and the cultural forces it has either unleashed or played a part in amplifying. At bottom, the military-industrial complex, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street are what Max Weber would have described as components of the process of modernization and rationalization of life: systematizing, quantifying, and bureaucratizing the spheres that they control. They are all dependent on the progress of science and technology, whether for the next generation of smart weapon, the virtual-reality glasses that Silicon Valley needs to obtain even more commercial data from the consumer, or the next financial algorithm (and the computers that can use it) in order to extract rents from a stream of investment capital. They are all creatures of science and technology, as well as the scientific method of rational inquiry that underlies them.

[bemildred]

4. That is a big subject, and I'm not getting into it today.

However I will say that I have been struck for a long time, since Vietnam, by the inability of the US government to correct itself any more, and the apparent inability of the US' ruling elites to understand the threat that poses to them. But then our cultural elites come largely from our economic elites, so what you get is the worship of money, and not much else, duh. It was not until Raygun came in that I was sure they were going to double down on the jingo politics, after Vietnam there was some doubt for a while, promises were made. Since then I've been watching and waiting for the coming debacle, which I would say we are well into the middle of now.

But yes, I like that piece, puts his finger right on the problem that we, the US, must solve if we are to reverse our decline, mob rule is not the way to a better future.